The Fall

by John Lescroart

  She started to speak, but nothing came out. Clearing her throat, she leveled her gaze at him. “Greg,” she said, “what are you doing?”

  Out of the shadows now, he stood—the gun for the moment at his side—under the wide arch that delineated the living room’s entrance. “I would think that would be obvious, wouldn’t you?”

  “Not really, no. I see the gun, but that makes no sense. What are you going to do with a gun? Since when do you even have a gun?”

  This brought a small acknowledging nod. “Since that great patriot Trevor Ames hired me. He believes in every American’s God-given right to bear arms, and I must say that, after a lot of reflection, I don’t think he’s all wrong. When he brings new people on board, the first thing he does is cut a bonus check that we’re supposed to use to buy the weapon of our choice, if we don’t already have one.”

  She pointed. “And that’s the gun you bought?”

  “No. No, no, no, Beck. If it were my gun, registered to me, then I really couldn’t use it the way I need to tonight. A guy learns a few things if he spends some time in jail, believe me. This”—he held it up—“is a gun I bought on the street in Oakland last month when I first started to think that things with me and Allie were going to end badly. Eventually. I thought it would be a good idea to be prepared for when the day came.”

  “For what, exactly?”

  He tsked. “Rebecca, you’re not that slow. You’re not slow at all.”

  “You’re going to kill the three of us? In cold blood?” She shook her head. “There’s just no way, Greg. No fucking way.” She started to get up.

  Stepping forward, he raised the gun, pointing it at her face. “Sit back down, or I swear to God I will shoot you dead right now.”

  She hesitated for a second, cast a frustrated glance at Shrek and at Allie, then sighed and lowered herself back down. “Do you mind telling us why? And while we’re at it, why Anlya?”

  He was standing five feet or so from her, in front of the faux mantel. “That was a mistake. I never meant for that to happen. I’m not the kind of person who would . . . or I wasn’t. I’m still not. This is not going to continue, after tonight, I mean. This is not how I wanted anything to turn out. I just wanted her to move out. It wasn’t working between us, and she just kept fighting me on it.”

  “You’re talking Allie now?”

  “Of course. What did it sound like?”

  Allie found her voice. “I’ll move out, Greg. I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. I’ll never talk about any of this. I’ll never tell anybody you hit me.”

  “You made me hit you! You could have just left.”

  “I did. I did. I’m sorry. It’s not too late, though. I’ve forgotten it already. I mean it. I’ll just let it go and leave forever, and you’ll never have to think about me again.”

  “No. You can’t now.”

  “I can.”

  “No. Because now you’ve told her.” Pointing at Rebecca. “And she would never let it go. Would you, Beck?”

  “The two of you could talk me into it, I’m sure.”

  Greg barked out a quick laugh. “Hah. Not after Allie came here tonight. That’s what settled it.”

  “All right,” Rebecca said. She threw out another gambit to keep him distracted. “But you started talking about Anlya.”

  “Anlya.” He shook his head with what appeared to be real sadness. “I shouldn’t have done what we did. The sex, I mean. I didn’t plan that. I—”

  Rebecca shot back at him. “You used a condom, Greg. Of course you planned it.”

  “I didn’t plan it!” The thought, or maybe Rebecca’s disregard of his excuse, clearly enraged him. And still he gathered himself to explain it all away. “This just in, Beck. Smart guys carry condoms on the off chance. It wasn’t about the condom.”

  “No? What was it about, then? Love?”

  For the third time, he raised the gun at her. “You think this is a joke? You’re making fun of me?”

  “No. I think it’s pathetic, not funny.”

  Lowering the gun, he shook his head. “You weren’t there. We got to the car, and she just wouldn’t stop crying. I was trying to tell her it would be all right. Maybe I loved her in some way, okay, but we couldn’t do anything about it. It wasn’t right. She was too young. If nothing else, no matter what I wanted, maybe what we both wanted, it would be illegal. If anybody found out, it would be the end of my job, my career. I might even go to jail. But she just wouldn’t hear about it.”

  “And one thing led to another?”

  “I’m human, goddammit! How much am I supposed to be able to take? It got to a certain point and I gave in. All right? I fell.”

  “And so you had to kill her?”

  “I told you. That was a mistake. I never meant . . . I mean after, we went for a walk to talk things out. I couldn’t make her understand that it couldn’t happen again. We had to put it behind us and go on from there. Maybe in a year, when she was . . . in a different situation. But she wouldn’t hear of that. And then we’re getting back near the garage, and she became like a different person and out of nowhere started threatening me. If we weren’t going to be together, then that meant I had used her, didn’t it? I didn’t really love her at all. If I did, I’d want to be with her, wouldn’t I?”

  “What could she threaten you with, Greg? This teenager?”

  “She said she would claim I raped her, that I forced her. That if I really tried to leave her, if I went ahead and dumped her, then it would get bad for me. She would tell whoever she needed to, to get me punished. If I thought I was in trouble now, I should just wait. I mean, she just went crazy. You have to understand that. That’s the main thing. She wasn’t like I’d ever seen her before, holding on to me, grabbing me, not letting me go, begging me not to leave her, just crying out. ‘Please please please.’ That was when it went so wrong. All the noise in the world, right there out on the street, where any minute somebody could come up on us. She kept begging and wouldn’t let me go.”

  “So you pushed her?”

  “Just to get her off me.”

  “And over the wall.”

  Greg grabbed a staggering breath. “I never even saw the wall. I didn’t know it was that low. I wasn’t even aware of it.”

  “And she went over.”

  For a second or two, all was dead silence.

  “I never meant to hurt her,” he whispered. “I never meant to hurt anybody. I’m a good person. It was just one second of weakness.”

  “That’s not what killing us would be, Greg,” Rebecca said. “Killing us would make you a real murderer, not an accidental one.”

  “No. That wouldn’t be my fault. This—what’s happening here—isn’t my fault. You’ve both pushed me to this. You and Allie.”

  “And what about me?” Shrek said in a small voice. “Why am I part of this?”

  He shrugged as though truly apologizing. “I’m sorry, I really am, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to be collateral damage.”

  He looked down at the gun in his hand, drew a breath, and started to raise it.

  Three sharp raps on the front door, Dismas Hardy’s voice behind it. “Beck! Are you in there? Open up!”

  Whirling halfway around, since he’d been facing Shrek, Greg extended the gun and fired twice in rapid succession into the upper center of the door. Without any hesitation, he started to turn back toward his three captives, but while he still mostly faced the door, he’d barely squeezed off the second shot when Rebecca saw her only chance and threw herself off the couch, headfirst into Greg’s body, slamming him up against the mantel.

  The gun went off again.

  Swinging wildly, Greg was all elbows as he went down under Rebecca. She slammed the hand that held the gun into the wall behind him once, twice, a third time.

  But Greg was stronger than she was, and she couldn’t knock it loose.

  With a screaming grunt, he managed to throw her off him, bringing the gun around to bear . .
.

  The front door exploded open and Abe Glitsky followed it in. “Drop it! Don’t move! Drop it!” He had a gun leveled at Treadway, who was sitting halfway up on the floor, frozen as though in a tableau before he locked his gaze on Glitsky, registered the gun pointed at his heart, and in one swift move brought his own gun up to his right temple.

  “Put it down!” Glitsky said. “Just let it go.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Let go of the gun. Now.”

  Treadway directed a flat gaze at Abe. “This is not who I am,” he said. His gun still pressed up against his head, he cast a glance at Rebecca, the other women, and finally, back at Glitsky. “I am so so sorry. This has all gone so wrong.”

  He pulled the trigger.

  In the crowded room, all became stillness and shock.

  His gun now at his side, Glitsky stared at the scene for a beat as Treadway slumped down and Rebecca scrambled around and struggled unsteadily to her feet.

  “Anybody else hurt?” Glitsky stepped over closer to Treadway to make sure he wasn’t moving, then turned to The Beck. “Call nine-one-one,” he said. “Your dad’s down out here in the hallway.”

  44

  THE DOCTOR EMERGED from the operating room a little after one-thirty A.M. To Rebecca’s eyes, her light blue scrubs sported a disconcerting amount of bloodstains. Her face was drawn with tension and fatigue. Neither, Rebecca thought, was a good sign.

  Frannie let go of Rebecca’s hand, and both of them stood up from the couch they’d been sharing. Glitsky, who’d arrived only ten minutes before, and Vincent, who’d made it up from Menlo Park in just over a half hour, got to their feet as well.

  Her hand to her mouth, Frannie took a tentative step toward the doctor, who held up a calming hand, and some of the lines around her eyes seemed to soften. For an instant, Rebecca let herself entertain a flutter of hope.

  “Let’s start with the good stuff,” the doctor said. “Your husband is going to live.”

  The hand that had been over Frannie’s mouth went down to cover her heart. “Oh, thank God,” she said as tears began to overflow onto her cheeks. Her two children came up to flank her in a tangle of arms.

  Off to the side, ignoring the relieved relatives, Glitsky said, “What’s the bad stuff?”

  “Well, it’s not all that bad. He’ll have some recovering to do. He’s weak from blood loss. Otherwise, he’s got a broken rib that’s going to hurt for a while but which stopped one of the bullets before it hit his heart. The wound itself isn’t deep, and neither is the one where the slug bounced off his skull.”

  Frannie, allowing a pulse of laughter through her steady tears, said, “He’s always had a really hard head.”

  “His rib stopped a bullet?” Vincent asked. “How does that happen?”

  “They were twenty-twos,” Glitsky explained, “and they went through a hollow-core door first, which tends to slow things down. Still, pretty lucky.”

  “If you’ve got to get shot in the first place,” Vincent said.

  “Well, yeah,” Glitsky said. “That.”

  •  •  •

  THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, Wyatt Hunt sat in the sand at Fort Point. It was a miserably cold and rainy day, but he was in his wet suit, and that didn’t matter too much. Next to him, in Hunt’s wife’s borrowed wet suit, Max Paulson jumped to his feet, wanting to get back to the windboards and give it another try. He hadn’t had a lot of luck staying up, with the near gale and the accompanying deep swells running in under the Golden Gate, but he was stoked by the entire experience.

  That day the previous summer when Leon Copes had been arrested outside Sharla’s house, after they’d stopped by the Bezdekian grocery to return the goods Max had stolen, Hunt had laid some good-natured grief on Max for having made him miss his planned day of windboarding. Max had told Hunt that he’d love to try it sometime, and though neither of them had followed up, obviously, Max had meant it, because when Hunt called to tell him about the end of Greg Treadway and his confession that he’d killed Anlya, Max had brought up the topic again: How about if Hunt took him down and gave him a lesson?

  And now here they were.

  “Let’s give it another five,” Hunt said. “Catch a little more breath. It’ll beat you up out there if you’re not careful.”

  “Okay, but I’m good to go,” Max said, “just so you know.”

  “I’m sure you are, and I am, too,” Hunt replied. “But I need a couple more minutes. That last ride wore me out. Up as long as I was and all.”

  “Rubbing it in, now,” Max said, showing the trace of a smile.

  “Just sayin’,” Hunt replied.

  With obvious reluctance, Max lowered himself to a squat. “All right.” He sifted some sand through his hands. “So do you mind if I ask how much all of this cost?”

  “All what?”

  “You know. The wet suits, the boards, the gear?”

  “The car to pack it in?”

  Another smile. “That, too, I suppose.”

  “A lot. But you don’t need to worry about it,” Hunt said. “Give me some warning, and we can come out together again. Make it a regular thing.”

  “I don’t want to be a pest.”

  “You get close to pestiness, I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, bringing up the elephant in the living room—or on the beach, in this case—how are you holding up with the Treadway news?”

  Max shrugged. “I don’t feel much of anything. He’s gone. The world’s a better place for that, I suppose. But nothing’s going to bring Anlya back, and that’s the only thing I’d care about that might make any difference. I guess it was good to find out for sure it was Greg who did it. Which didn’t surprise me, though for a while there I was pretty sure it was Leon.”

  “The elusive Leon.”

  “You got it.”

  Hunt clucked in frustration. “That’s the one thing I didn’t get about that night, that just didn’t make any sense. I mean, why was Leon there? In the private-eye business, there’s a rule that there’s no such thing as coincidence. And in this case, it’s like, really? He just happened to be in that tunnel at that moment? Are you shitting me?”

  Max glanced at him sideways. “That wasn’t it,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it wasn’t a coincidence. Leon went down there looking for her.”

  “He did? How did he know where—”

  “Because he was staying with Sharla that day when Anlya called her.”

  “The day she was killed?”

  “Yeah. And she told Sharla about her date with Greg, all excited about it. They were going to Chinatown, her favorite. And right after Leon finds out about that . . .”

  “How’s he do that? Find out, I mean.”

  “Sharla just tells him. And as soon as she does, Leon lights out on Anlya’s trail.”

  “But why?”

  “With Leon, you can never be sure, but Sharla told us—me and Auntie Juney—that he thought Anlya was a threat to him. She knew he was back with Sharla, she might tell somebody about him raping her, and that could get him back in jail.”

  “So he went down there looking for her?”

  Max nodded. “Pretty obviously. He knew where she was going, and he wanted to talk to her. At least talk to her, maybe shut her up. So there it is, no coincidence at all. Just Sharla being Sharla. But when I told her about Greg, that he’d admitted he was guilty to three witnesses, I could tell it put her mind a bit at ease. Sharla might have told Leon where Anlya would be, but at least he didn’t kill her, which means she didn’t actually help her daughter’s murderer, albeit inadvertently.”

  “Albeit inadvertently?”

  Max broke into a sheepish grin. “Sorry. Debate Club words.”

  “It’s okay,” Hunt said, “I can handle them. Hang out with lawyers like I do, and you get a lot of that, albeit inadvertently.”

  •  •�
� •

  ON THAT SAME Saturday, Rebecca finished her lunch at the family home on Thirty-Fourth Avenue, then went into the living room to check up on her pajama-clad father, who’d been asleep in his reading chair when she arrived.

  Apparently, he still was.

  She stood in front of him for a minute or two, then came closer and went down on one knee. He looked fairly old and battered, with several days of gray stubble and his head wrapped in gauze. Maybe he felt the weight of her gaze on him, maybe he became subliminally aware of her breathing, but suddenly, he opened his eyes. His expression softened before he closed his eyes for another second or two, then he reached out and touched her shoulder.

  “How’s my girl?” he asked.

  “I’m good. A little freaked out about humanity but holding on. The question is, how are you?”

  “I’d kind of forgotten how much fun it is to get shot, but otherwise peachy.”

  “Peachy?”

  “Relatively speaking. Everything still hurts more than I think it should, but that’s probably me just being a wimp.”

  “Probably. That’s what Uncle Abe would say, anyway.”

  “Then it must be true.”

  “So”—she hesitated—“I’ve got a question.”

  “Wait,” he said. “I’ve got an answer. Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon.”

  “That’s not it. It’s nothing about Bull Durham.”

  “Darn. Best movie ever made, in my opinion.”

  “Undoubtedly. But unfortunately not what my question is about.”

  “Okay, then. What?”

  Rebecca sat down on the corner of his ottoman. “Why in the world did you show up at my place, and with Uncle Abe, no less?”

  “Ah, that.”

  “That,” she said.

  “Well, remember when you called me to ask my opinion about what you should do with Allie and Greg just before you left to go home and meet up with her?”

  “Sure.”

  “And then as you were driving home, I’m afraid I called you again, didn’t I? Just to make sure that you were driving carefully and the roads weren’t too bad?”

  “Yep.”

  “When I got the very distinct impression that you thought I was being paranoid and a little overboard in the parental area.”